Beautifully preserved feathers belonged to tiny flying dinosaurs

AROUND 99 million years ago, this tiny dinosaur had a sticky encounter. Today, its feathered wings look almost exactly as they did when it became stuck in resin.

Lida Xing at the China University of Geosciences in Beijing, who has led an analysis of two similar partial amber fossils, says these dinosaurs may only have been 3.5 centimetres in length. Their size suggests they were probably juveniles.

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The wings are so well preserved it’s possible to tell that these dinosaurs were Enantiornithes – a cousin group to today’s birds (Nature Communications, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms12089). Although this group has a different shoulder structure from birds, their flight feathers are nearly identical, suggesting they flew in the same way birds do today.

As fossils like these come to light, we are beginning to understand the origin of flight as a gradual process, with gliding birds giving rise to crude powered flight, followed by skilled powered flight. These new fossils may help us determine when skilled flight began.

“It really looks like the common ancestor shared between modern birds and the Enantiornithes is exactly where many of the features that we see in modern bird flight evolved,” says Richard Prum at Yale University.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Tiny dinosaurs flew like birds”